Thursday Reads

Posted: April 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Crime, morning reads, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 33 Comments

Good Morning!

Last night, George Zimmerman, the man who shot unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin and triggered nationwide outrage was booked on second degree murder charges and is now in Seminole County jail. He will appear before a judge this morning.

George Zimmerman arrived at the Seminole County Jail this evening, about two hours after officials announced that he will face a second-degree murder charge in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

Special Prosecutor Angela Corey announced the second-degree murder charge at the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville tonight, more than six weeks after Trayvon and Zimmerman’s fatal encounter.

If convicted, Zimmerman would face up to life in prison on the first-degree felony charge. He arrived at the Seminole County jail about 8:30 p.m. tonight, greeted by a throng of reporters shouting questions.

George Zimmerman's booking photo

I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen broken noses before. Zimmerman’s doesn’t look like the ones I’ve seen, but as I said, I’m not a doctor.

I just have a few more links related to this story. Trayvon Martin’s parents have behaved with dignity and grace during a time that for them can only have been nightmarish. Via Raw Story, yesterday, they reacted to the arrest and charging of the man who killed their son in an interview with the AP. When asked what they would do if they had an opportunity to talk with George Zimmerman.

“I would probably give him the opportunity to apologize,” said Sybrina Fulton, Travyon Martin’s mother. I would probably ask him if there was another way he could have helped settle the confrontation that he had with Trayvon, other than the way it ended, with Trayvon being shot.”

Tracy Martin, the boy’s father, said he would ask Zimmerman what his motive was.

“Why was he patrolling the neighborhood with a 9mm gun?” he said. “What was it about my son that made him suspicious? What made him decide to disobey the dispatcher, who is trained to handle 911 calls? Why does he feel his life is so altered and does he understand that he altered his own life by refusing to stay in his vehicle? Was it really worth it? Was it really worth taking an innocent child’s life?”

The right wing site the Daily Caller, which has had access to Zimmerman family members reported that George Zimmerman used the My Space handle “datniggytb.”

George Zimmerman, the Hispanic Floridian who killed black teenager Trayvon Martin on Feb. 26, had a MySpace account whose username was “datniggytb,” The Daily Caller has learned.

According to a family member whose identity The Daily Caller has agreed not to reveal for safety reasons, the “datniggytb” name is not a racial slur, but a friendly nickname that referred to George himself.

“That was an old nickname his black friends gave him,” the Zimmerman family member said. “He didn’t have an issue with the profile name.”

The family member at first denied that George had a My Space account, and later came up with the “black friends” explanation. I hope someone in the Justice Department reads The Daily Caller.

In other news, the US Justice Department has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Apple and three publishers for conspiring to fix the price of e-books in order to force Amazon to charge higher prices.

The announcement, made in Washington by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Sharis A. Pozen, the acting assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, capped a long investigation. The inquiry hinged on the question of whether publishers, at the urging of Steven P. Jobs, then Apple’s chief executive, agreed to adopt a new policy in 2010 that in essence coordinated the price of newly released e-books at the price offered in Apple’s iBookstore — typically between $12.99 and $14.99.

At the time, Apple with its blockbuster iPad was trying to challenge Amazon’s hold on the e-book market. Amazon, the online retail giant, had become a kind of Walmart for the e-book business by lowering the price of most new and best-selling e-books to $9.99 — a price meant to stimulate sales of its own e-reading device, the Kindle.

Publishers, looking for leverage against Amazon, saw Apple as their white knight. The Justice Department complaint, using language that could have been inspired by a best-selling white-collar crime novel, describes how executives from the publishing companies met to discuss business matters “in private rooms for dinner in upscale Manhattan restaurants,” tried to hide their communications by issuing instructions to “double-delete” e-mails, all the time complaining of Amazon’s increasing influence over the e-book market.

Ultimately, the Justice Department charges, the publishers and Apple conspired to limit e-book price competition, increasing Amazon’s e-book retail prices and causing “consumers to pay tens of millions of dollars more for e-books than they otherwise would have paid.”

Three publishers have already settled with the Justice Department. As a Kindle owner, I’ve long hoped this would happen. Steve Jobs made me pay more for books, and I strongly resent it.

Yesterday, while promoting “the Buffet rule,” President Obama used the sainted Ronald Reagan as a stick to beat Republicans with. From Raw Story:

He described for the audience the actions of one of his predecessors in the Oval Office, a president who “gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong. So this president gave another speech where he said it was ‘crazy’—that’s a quote—that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.”

“That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior,” he said, “was Ronald Reagan.”

Mitt Romney is still struggling to convince women that He and other Republicans aren’t waging war on them. He’s trying to do this by accusing the Obama administration of a war on women, but he can’t articulate how that war works, according to Talking Points Memo.

The campaign faced a number of questions in [a] press call as to just how Obama’s supposed “War on Women” worked, none of which produced a direct answer. Asked by TPM on the call to explain how another president taking office in January 2009 might have affected the gender gap in job growth, Romney adviser Lanhee Chen only said that the pattern was unusual compared with other recessions and that he believed a president like Romney would have gotten different results….

Chen was pressed again by another reporter to explain why women were disproportionately affected and what “difference in policy” would have changed the equation.

“The president’s policies in general, whether it’s Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or any of the policies they have pursued have really hurt both men and women,” he said. “This president has demonstrated that he’s doing everything in his power to scare away job creators and that’s had a disproportionate impact on women. That’s just a statistical fact.”

Asked a third time to explain the origins of this gender divide and how Romney would tackle the ratio of job losses specifically, Chen again said “it is a fact” that women have suffered disproportionately but offered no specific answer.

“[Romney] would undo the damage that President Obama has done,” he said. “He would take the economy in a very different direction and, as a result of that, produce very substantial job gains and growth for men and women.”

Al-righty-then.

Dakinikat covered that story really well yesterday, so if you haven’t read her post yet, be sure to check it out.

RNC chairman Reince Priebus announced yesterday that he isn’t backing down on his comparison of the notion of a Republican war on women to a war on caterpillars. Politico:

Reince Priebus said Wednesday he has no intention of taking back his “war on caterpillars” comment that landed him at the center of criticism last week — in fact, the chairman of the Republican National Committee vowed he’d gladly “double down” on the remark.

“I’m not going to walk back — I’ll double down on it,” Priebus said on MSNBC when asked whether he wanted to walk back or clarify his choice of words. “This war of women is a fiction that the Democrats have created, and the real war on women is the war that this president has put forward on the American people by not following through on his promises, by having women disproportionately affected by the Obama economy.”

He continued, “Go read Anita Dunn’s book if you want to go read about a war on women in the workplace — go read that book and you’ll see what the White House’s record is on women.”

Yes, Obama treated women working in the White House like shit. I read Confidence Men. So because Obama is a dick, Priebus wants us to vote for the party of personhood bills, vaginal probes, and birth control bans? A plague on both their houses.

Remember “killer bees?” A beekeeper in East Tennessee was stung 30 times by “partially Africanized bees” AKA “killer bees.”

Africanized bee swarm

A swarm of as many as 100,000 bees attacked a Tennessee beekeeper last month, and genetic testing of the angry critters has now revealed that they were partially Africanized bees. This is the first time that Africanized bees have been found in Tennessee.

Africanized bees, often referred to as “killer bees,” are a hybrid cross between the bee species normally found in America and African honey bees (Apis mellifera scutellata), which were originally introduced to the Americas as a productive source of honey. But the African honey bees take over hives wherever they spread, killing the hives’ original queens and hybridizing with resident populations. The hybridized Africanized bees are significantly more aggressive than other bees and more likely to attack in massive swarms when defending their nests. Their stings are no worse than those of other bees, but the sheer number of them can create more life-threatening situations, especially in anyone who is allergic to bee stings.

According to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, genetic tests on the recent swarm found that the bees were less than 17 percent Africanized, which is why they are considered “partially Africanized.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture considers truly Africanized bees to have 50 percent African genetics.

Eeeeeek!

In related news, Africanized bees are suspected in a recent Texas swarm that attacked three people and a horse. The horse, which was observed almost completely covered in bees, later died from allergic reactions to the stings.

Finally, Connie from Orlando (AKA ecocatwoman) sent me a link to an interview that Terry Gross conducted yesterday with singer/songwriter Carole King. I grew up listening to Goffin-King songs, so I plan to listen to it ASAP. The occasion for the interview was her memoir A Natural Woman.

King, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, has written for everyone from Little Eva to Aretha Franklin to James Taylor. Her 1971 solo album Tapestry spent 15 weeks at the top of the charts, and stayed on the charts for more than six years.

But King was just 15 when she and three classmates formed a vocal quartet called the Co-Sines at James Madison High School. At night, she attended disc jockey Alan Freed’s concerts — a veritable “who’s who” of rock ‘n’ roll performers — and later set up a meeting with Freed, an internationally known rock promoter she thought could help her break into the songwriting business. Freed told her to look up the names of record companies in the phone book.

She recounts the story in her new memoir, A Natural Woman, explaining that she called Atlantic Records and arranged a meeting. Soon after, she wrote her first big hit — the Shirelles number, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” — with Gerry Goffin, who would later become her husband.

So in honor of the woman who helped to create the soundtrack to my pre-teen and teenage years:

Now what’s on your reading and listening list today?

They must think Women are Really Stupid

Posted: April 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: abortion rights, War on Women, We are so F'd, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 31 Comments

Unless Harvard MBA math is radically different from the math taught in this universe, the Romney campaign must have decided that women are really gullible and stupid.  They realize they have a gender gap and have decided giving us bad math and no answers is the answer.  The Republican moves to regain ground with women are akin to an ad campaign coming from the writers of Mad Men. It’s a blast from the stereotype past.  Not only is the ad lame and dated, but it doesn’t hold up to fact checking and questioning which is very easy to do on today’s internet database.  Etcha Sketch positions and lies don’t cut it with most of the women I know.

First, we learned Romney keeps in touch with women by sending his wife–the great white rich huntress–out to stalk the elusive beasts that are rare animals in the world of venture and plunder finance. How does Romney answer questions about women’s concerns?

Virtually every time, Romney answers by invoking his wife of 43 years, and reports what’s she’s told him about what women want.

“She reports to me regularly that the issue women care about most is the economy, and getting good jobs for their kids and for themselves,” Romney told the Newspaper Association of America on Wednesday. “They are concerned about gasoline prices, the cost of getting to and from work, taking their kids to school or to practice and so forth after school. That is what women care about in this country, and my vision is to get America working again.”

A few days earlier in Middleton, he was asked how he’d counter the Democrats’ narrative on contraception. He prefaced his answer this way: “I wish Ann were here … to answer that question in particular.”

Then, we saw Republican Fembots out on the talk circuit–Nikki Haley being one–to say that women really want good jobs for their sons and don’t care at all about their health concerns like pregnancy prevention and access to mammograms for women without private health insurance.

During an appearance on ABC’s The View, co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asked Haley how conservatives could make the case that Republicans represent the interest of women.

“All of my policy is not based on a label,” Haley remarked. “It’s based on what I’ve lived and what I know: Women don’t care about contraception. They care about jobs and the economy and raising their families and all of those things.”

Then, they send Prince Reibus to the chat spin zone who says the War on Women was a campaign ploy with as much validity as a War on Caterpillars after we’ve endured about two years with of laws to defund Planned Parenthood, remove state equal pay laws, and block women’s constitutional right to access abortion, birth control, and health care in general. Then there are the Ryan spending priorities which hit women, the elderly and children hardest while giving millionaires more tax breaks.  Here’s a few headlines just to remind you what they’ve been up to the first two weeks of April alone.  Notice that the list of restrictions aimed at women are aren’t exactly coming from the most blue states with Democratic Governors.   Don’t forget Romney has vowed to get rid of Planned Parenthood and Title X and supports the Blunt Amendment.

The Los Angeles Times: Mississippi could close state’s sole abortion clinic, by Richard Fausset

ABC News: Texas Teacher Fired for Unwed Pregnancy Offered to Get Married, by Christina Ng

USA Today: Ariz. House OKs bill banning abortions after 20 weeks, by Alia Beard Rau

WEAU-TV: Controversial abortion bill among several Walker quietly signed into law, by Aaron Dimick

ACLU press release: ACLU and Women’s Health Groups File Lawsuit to Protect Vital Health Services in Oklahoma

Let’s put that in perspective for the years 2011 and 2012 to date.

“We’re looking at about 430 abortion restrictions that have been introduced into state legislatures this year, which is pretty much in the same ballpark as 2011,” says Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group that focuses on health and reproductive rights. This year, Nash says, “is shaping up to be quite busy.”

Keep in mind, 2011 was already a watershed year for abortion restrictions: States passed 83 such laws, more than triple the 23 laws passed in 2010. And much of that had to do with the 2010 election, when Republicans gained control of many state legislatures. With the political makeup of state capitols unchanged, lawmakers are continuing to put more limits abortion.

The latest Romney lie should make Romney’s nose reach all the way around the world to touch the back of his head. Romney just doesn’t spin a story to his advantage, he makes things up from whole cloth.  This time he’s playing numbers games with unemployment statistics.

Mitt Romney’s campaign wants you to know that the same president who argues for contraceptive coverage and suggests that a Congress with more female members would get more accomplished has also presided over disproportionate job losses among women.

On April 6, 2012, Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul tweeted, “FACT: Women account for 92.3% of the jobs lost under @BarackObama, a claim also made on Romney’s website.

She followed it up a few hours later with this: “@BarackObama touts policies for women & 92.3% jobs lost under him r women’s. He’s even more clueless than we thought.”

When we asked for backup for the claim, the campaign cited national employment figures spanning four years. We found that though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.

Here is the real bottom line from PolitiFact.

… if you count all those jobs lost beginning in 2007, women account for just 39.7 percent of the total.

Romney denies that his gender gap is due to the many laws passed recently to restrict women’s civil liberties and rights.

As the Republican field winnowed Tuesday, Mitt Romney made an appeal to a voting bloc key to any candidate’s success in November: women.

Though the day’s headlines revolved around a decision by former Sen. Rick Santorum to suspend his campaign, Mitt Romney barreled forward with a push against Democrats as to who could best appeal to female voters.

Speaking at a Delaware structural steel factory, Romney responded to Democratic claims his party had waged a “war on women” and alienated female voters. Romney turned the argument around, accusing President Barack Obama’s administration of failing working women.

“The real war on women has been the job losses as the result of the Obama economy,” he told an audience in Wilmington, saying women had lost 92.3% of jobs lost under the Obama administration.

Romney said his private sector career had helped him understand what women worry about: jobs and the economy.

“If we’re going to get women back to work and help women with the real issues women care about – good jobs, good wages, a bright future for themselves, their families, and their kids, we’re going to have to elect a president who understands how the economy works, and I do.”

I would argue that understanding the unemployment  rates would be one of them.   So given that, wouldn’t you think Romney would know what he thinks about the Lilly Ledbetter Act and its status as Obama’s signature law to help women and pay?  This happened this morning. 

Given that Tea Party/Koch Puppet Governor Walker of Wisconsin just repealed his state’s equal pay act, you think some one in the Romney campaign would realize it’s an important question for women who work.  Obviously, the DNC and the Obama campaign have already asked the question.

The Democratic National Committee chairwoman called out Republican Gov. Scott Walker today for repealing Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, a law intended to lower the cost for plaintiffs suing employers for pay discrimination.

“He tried to quietly repeal the Equal Pay Act. Women aren’t going to stand for that,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The law allowed for victims to sue employers in state court which is often less expensive than filing in federal court.

The Republican controlled state Senate passed the measure in November, followed by passage in the state Legislature in February. Walker then repealed it Thursday.

“The focus of the Republican Party on turning back the clock for women really is something that’s unacceptable and shows how callus and insensitive they are towards women’s priorities,” the Florida congresswoman said.

National Republicans have yet to comment on the Wisconsin repeal but the Obama campaign has seized the opportunity to tie Walker’s law to Mitt Romney, who has argued that women voters in 2012 only care about pocketbook issues.

“Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?” Obama campaign representative Lis Smith said Friday.

This sounds a lot like Romney’s journey to the Blunt Amendment this year.  First, Romney says no state is trying to make birth control illegal, then he says that birth control is a private issue, then, he supports the intrusive Blunt Amendment within the hour of not supporting it.

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Wednesday he opposed Senate Republicans’ effort that critics say would limit insurance coverage of birth control, then reversed himself quickly in a second interview saying he misunderstood the question.

Romney told Ohio News Network during an interview that he opposed a measure by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., that was scheduled for a vote Thursday. “I’m not for the bill,” Romney said before urging the interviewer to move on.

Romney later said he didn’t understand the question.

“Of course I support the Blunt amendment. I thought he was talking about some state law that prevented people from getting contraception so I was simply — misunderstood the question and of course I support the Blunt amendment,” Romney later told Howie Carr’s radio program in Boston, noting that Blunt is his campaign’s point man in the Senate.

Just hours earlier, ONN reporter Jim Heath asked Romney about rival Rick Santorum and the cultural debate happening in the campaign and the legislation proposed by Blunt and co-sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

“He’s brought contraception into this campaign. The issue of birth control — contraception, Blunt-Rubio — is being debated, I believe, later this week. It deals with banning or allowing employers to ban providing female contraception. Have you taken a position on it?” Heath said. “He (Santorum) said he was for that. We’ll talk about personhood in a second, but he’s for that. Have you taken a position?”

Romney replied: “I’m not for the bill, but look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.”

So, the Romney camp holds a campaign call on “women’s issues”, wants to talk about women and jobs, then has no idea what the Lilly Ledbetter Act is or what Romney thinks about it.  This is major fail imho and just like the clueless response on the Blunt Amendment Dosado.  Maddow sums this up succinctly.

Romney has cited a misleading statistic, and his aides couldn’t defend it. Romney has said current policies are keeping women from getting more jobs, and given three separate chances to say something coherent, his aides couldn’t explain what would change if the former governor is elected president. Were they not expecting these kinds of question?

To borrow a Casey Stengel line, can’t anybody here play this game?

As for the Fair Pay law, Lilly Ledbetter released a statement shortly after the Romney campaign wouldn’t state the former governor’s position on this.

“I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Mitt Romney is not willing to stand up for women and their families. If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. This Act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also. Women earn just 77 cents to every dollar that men earn for the same job, which is why President Obama took decisive action and made this the first bill that he signed when he took office. Women should have the ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers.

“Anyone who wants to be President of the United States shouldn’t have to think about whether they support pursuing every possible avenue to ensuring women get the same pay for the same work as men. Our economic security depends on it.”

Eventually, after Ledbetter’s statement was released to the media, the Republican campaign said a Romney administration wouldn’t try to repeal the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, but wouldn’t say whether Romney supported the law itself. (Remember, the vast majority of congressional Republicans opposed the law when it passed in 2009.)

I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I would vote for this schmuck.  I say this as women who ran as a Republican in the 1990s and who is squarely an independent today.  You have to be a seriously self loathing woman to consider voting for today’s Republican Party.  They’ve gone way off the deep end and Willard’s gone right with them.

News Flash: Women still expected not to age or put on weight

Posted: April 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , , | 28 Comments

We haven’t heard recently from Demi Moore whose meltdown was plastered every where. After having a lot of plastic surgery for a Charlie’s Angels movie and serving as the poster child for Cougar relationships, she evidently couldn’t deal with the expectations and her aging.  Demi’s not the only one whose body and relationships have been the obsession of an older woman hating media and culture.  The current object of weight jokes and speculation is pregnant Jessica Simpson.  Here’s supposedly feminist Joy Behar heaping the guilt on to Simpson.

The 31-year-old recently posed nude on the cover of Elle magazine, paying tribute to Demi Moore’s iconic cover, and she tweeted about it by making a joke of it.

“Last chance to see me ‘fat’ aka PREGNANT on the cover of Elle,” the mother-to-be tweeted. “I loved this shoot, [and it’s] only on stands for a few more days!”

Just last week while co-hosting The View, Joy Behar slammed Simpson’s weight gain during her first pregnancy. Talking to her fellow morning show hosts, the 69-year-old said: “Remember the time that Jessica Simpson was criticized because she didn’t know the difference between chicken and tuna? That kind of thing is more fun to criticize than the fact that the girl is fat.”

She also added: “Most women who are pregnant are not supposed to gain more than 25lbs. She looks like she gained a lot more than that.”

Sue me, but I think pregnancy weight gain is between a woman and her doctor.  I also don’t think it’s very sisterly of Behar to pile on, of course you can use effective methods like latex waist cinchers for weight loss and help yourself a little with that.

Ashely Judd has written an excellent piece on how the media gangs up on women who dare to age, not exercise maniacally and eat like anorexics, or who look okay because if they dare to look okay it must be due some kind of plastic surgery.  Judd also hits on the classic woman on woman jujitsu and the messed up meme that a woman who “lets herself go” is also losing her husband, boyfriend, whatever.

This expert from recent post on https://www.newyorkplasticsurgeryallure.com is worth sharing: The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

Very few women live their lives with healthy attitudes towards their aging bodies.  One of the few brave women has been Jamie Lee Curtis.

Jamie Lee Curtis discusses aging gracefully with co-hosts Gayle King and Erica Hill, live today, April 6, 2012, on CBS THIS MORNING on the CBS Television Network (7:00 AM – 9:00 AM).

Below is an excerpt from the interview.

KING: When there are so many women who don’t want — who are so afraid — to go there with the age. Why are you so comfortable with it?

CURTIS: I am pretty happy with who I am, and what I am doing, and it’s much more about the content of my character than the contour of my face.

We used to talk a lot about this in the good old days of “Our Bodies, Our Selves”.  However, most of us were not in the same shape as we are now.  We now have an entire category of mental illness called body dismorphic disorder which includes a range of behaviors like anorexia, bulimia and obsessive, perpetual plastic surgery.  The Hollywood frenzy feeders appear to feed these tendencies loudly and continually.  Judd’s article outlines exactly what she’s experienced.  Notice the sources aren’t all Perez Hilton or Joan Rivers.

However, the recent speculation and accusations in March feel different, and my colleagues and friends encouraged me to know what was being said. Consequently, I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

A brief analysis demonstrates that the following “conclusions” were all made on the exact same day, March 20, about the exact same woman (me), looking the exact same way, based on the exact same television appearance. The following examples are real, and come from a variety of (so-called!) legitimate news outlets (such as HuffPo, MSNBC, etc.), tabloid press, and social media:

One of my best friends suffers from body dismorphia.  I watched horrified as this friend of mine–a gorgeous woman in her mid-30s came back from a few years in California with all kinds of plastic surgery scars and changes.  She was trying to recreate a Glamour spread she had done while a teenager.  She also had done a stint on All My Children.  I guess this and other experiences contributed to an obsession with plastic surgery. She’s gotten help and is doing well now.  But, I was really worried about her for many years. I also worry whenever my very skinny youngest daughter thinks she’s getting fat.  Despite the knowledge we now have and diagnosis of this obsession as a mental illness, we still have the press–and other women–perpetuating the mean.

What makes me most sad about this is the number of women in the media–like Joy Behar–that contribute to the sense that no woman has the right to age.  It’s also a shame that the same expectations hoisted on us from the pin up girl days to now are still pervasive and doing damage.   We need to be brave like Judd and Curtis and speak out against unrealistic  views of women’s bodies and our  aging processes. The emphasis should be on what is healthy which varies from woman-to-woman.  We also should be aware of any false expectations of ourselves and others that are leading to this continuing, unhealthy trend and change our attitudes towards ourselves and other women.

Tuesday Reads

Posted: April 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads, Team Obama, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, War on Women, Women's Healthcare | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 49 Comments

Good Morning!

It is just me, or is racism coming to the surface with a vengeance after the Trayvon Martin shooting? Maybe it’s just that the media is covering it more. But when it comes to the right wingers, it seem to me that they’ve be somehow inspired by, rather than shocked by, George Zimmerman’s horrific act. I’ll give you some examples, but I don’t want to link to the winger sites. I’ll give you enough info so you can google them.

You’ve probably heard about the National Review’s firing of writer John Derbyshire after he wrote a blatantly racist piece in response to the Martin/Zimmerman case. Amy Davidson at the New Yorker:

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, announced over the weekend that he was ending the magazine’s association with John Derbyshire because of a post he published in Taki’s Magazine….Lowry said that the column, “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” was “nasty and indefensible.” Given its conceit—Derbyshire explaining to his children that black people are generally dumber than they are and dangerous and should, on the whole, be avoided—it might also be described as racist. (Josh Barro, at Forbes.com, called it “kind of unbelievably racist.”) In firing “Derb,” Lowry directed readers to his “delightful first novel” but said, in effect, that “Derb” had become bad for the NR brand:

We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.

Except as Davidson points out, barely disguised racism is hardly foreign to the National Review. Why should we believe Lowry is so shocked by it? More likely he acted because the column was getting so much negative attention.

And yesterday another right wing racist–some guy named Mark Judge–came out of the closet in a post at Tucker Carlson’s site The Daily Caller (google it to read the whole miserable thing) writes that he’s thrown off the chains of his “white guilt.” Why? Because his bike was stolen and he’s sure the thief must have been black–even though he has no idea who actually stole the bike.

First Judge establishes his “poor me-ness” by explaining that he really loved that bike, and his doctor recommended exercise to deal with the aftereffects of chemotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. AND he was at church on Good Friday when the must-have-been-black-guy stole his bike. AND he never went on disability during his chemo treatments. Break out the violins and handkerchiefs!

Next he claims

“a liberal friend gave me a lecture about profiling and told me to just forget about the bike. ‘That person needs our prayers and help,’ she said. ‘They haven’t had the advantages we have.’”

“They?” So this “liberal” also assumed the thief was black?

That’s when I lost it. I had been carefully educated by liberal parents that we are all, black and white, the same. My favorite movie growing up was “In the Heat of the Night.” Yet that often meant not treating everyone the same. It meant treating blacks with a mixture of patronizing condescension and obsequious genuflecting to their Absolute Moral Authority gained from centuries of suffering. It meant not treating everyone the same.

It meant leaving valuable things like a bike in a vulnerable position in a black part of town because you didn’t want to admit that the crime is worse in poor black neighborhoods.

And get this–Judge’s favorite movie used to be In the Heat of the Night. So he couldn’t possibly be a racist, right? Really, go read the post. The pretzel logic is beyond belief.

The news has been filled with reports of African Americans getting shot by white people. I don’t know if there’s been an uptick in race-related shootings or if they are just getting more coverage at the moment. This terrible case in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for example. The two shooters have now confessed.

The explanation for a shooting rampage that terrorized Tulsa’s black neighborhood and left three people dead may lie in a killing that took place more than two years ago.

Carl England, whose son is accused in the weekend shooting spree, was fatally shot in 2010 by a man who had threatened his daughter and tried to kick in the door of her home.

The man was black, and police say England’s son may have been seeking vengeance when he and his roommate shot five black people last week.

Police documents filed Monday in court say the two suspects have both confessed. According to an affidavit, 19-year-old Jake England admitted shooting three people and 32-year-old Alvin Watts confessed to shooting two.

So what was Watts’ motive then? It’s very sad that England’s father was killed, and the case does sound troubling

Back in 2010, Carl England had responded to his daughter’s call for help and with her boyfriend tracked down the man who tried to break in. A fight broke out, and the man took out a gun and fired at England.

The man who pulled the trigger, Pernell Jefferson, was not charged with homicide because an investigation determined he acted in self-defense.

Nevertheless, deciding that other innocent black people have to die because of what Jefferson did is still racist.

And then there’s right wingers and their hatred of poor people. That’s not news, but when a preacher unashamedly advertises it on Easter Sunday… Good grief! Kevin Drum: Helping the Poor is Now Apparently Anti-Bible.

I see that fellow Orange Countian Rick Warren — he of Saddleback megachurch and Purpose Driven Life fame — is in the news again. He was on ABC’s This Week yesterday, and Jake Tapper asked him what he thought about President Obama’s suggestion that God tells us to care for those less fortunate than ourselves:

Well certainly the Bible says we are to care about the poor….But there’s a fundamental question on the meaning of “fairness.” Does fairness mean everybody makes the same amount of money? Or does fairness mean everybody gets the opportunity to make the same amount of money? I do not believe in wealth redistribution, I believe in wealth creation.

The only way to get people out of poverty is J-O-B-S. Create jobs. To create wealth, not to subsidize wealth. When you subsidize people, you create the dependency. You — you rob them of dignity.

These people have completely removed Jesus from “christianity.”

Via The Minority Report at The Washington Free Beacon, It looks like the Obama Campaign needs to work a lot hard on diversity in hiring.

On Monday, Buzzfeed posted some photos of Obama campaign staff, and if there are any black faces in them, I can’t see them. Take a look at that Minority Report piece if you can. Here’s part of it:

In August 2011, Obama signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to develop plans for improving workforce diversity.

The apparent lack of racial diversity at the Obama campaign headquarters comes at a time when the national black unemployment rate is nearly double the rate for whites.

According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 14 percent of blacks are currently unemployed, compared with 7.3 percent of whites….

In Illinois, the black unemployment rate—as high as 28 percent, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security—far exceeds the national average.

What a hypocrite!

And check out this one on “Obama’s war on women” too.

Jeeze, where can we turn? Obviously, the Repubs are even worse. In case you missed it, Scott Walker recently surreptitiously signed anti-abortion and anti-birth control bills at the same time he repealed Wisconsin’s equal pay for women act.

I’ll end there, but in case you missed my evening post last night, please be sure to read Joseph Cannon’s important post on electronic spying by Progressive Insurance. Your car insurance company may be following suit soon.

What stories do you recommend this morning?

Women’s Issues are like an Imaginary War on Caterpillars because ?

Posted: April 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: War on Women, Women's Healthcare, Women's Rights | Tags: , | 22 Comments

Republicans are denying they have a woman problem.  They are using less-than-artful metaphors.  Several elected state officials have compared our pregnancies to those of livestock.  Now, our disgust with defunding of planned parenthood and restricting access to birth control are just basically an imaginary insect invasion dreamed up by the likes of James Carville.  Yup, the head of the RNC thinks that the War on Women’s reproductive and workplace rights are imaginary and akin to a War on Caterpillars.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus talked himself into some trouble this morning after accusing the media of creating a fake gender war and comparing it to a “war on caterpillars.”

“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Priebus said in an interview with Bloomberg TV’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” set to air this weekend. “It’s a fiction.”

Priebus appeared on the show with Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the pair debated gender issues, including contraception and requiring women to undergo ultrasounds before getting an abortion.

While Priebus blamed the media for blowing the debate out of proportion, Wasserman Schultz took the opportunity to blast Republicans for their stance on several of these issues.

“The jury of women across America have ruled that the Republicans have been unbelievably extreme and out of touch and hyper-focused on cultural issues,” Wasserman Schultz said on Bloomberg.

Yup, we’ve gone from livestock to insects in the minds of key Republican officials. You can watch this morning’s Caterpillar Catastrophe here. Don’t forget the Georgia “Women as Livestock” bill that severely restricts a woman’s constitutional right to abortion access.

Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention this month when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm. According to Rep. England and his warped thought process, if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead fetus, or one not expected to survive, should have to carry it to term.

Romney supporters have been scrambling to recover the number of women fleeing the party.  They insist that women have the same concerns that men do and that the democrats are simply inventing their anti-women positions.  Yet, Romney has recently reversed his old positions on women’s health to win right wing voters by adopting the anti-women positions of Santorum and others. Romney supported the Blunt amendment in a direct reversal of earlier comments that indicated a women’s access to birth control was a private matter.  Here’s his latest anti-women primary positions.

    1. He’s going to ‘get rid of’ Planned Parenthood. In his most blatant attack on basic women’s services, Romney made this claim: “Planned Parenthood, we’re going to get rid of that.” Of course, as a Presidential candidate Romney surely knows that Planned Parenthood provides essential medical services, primarily to low-income women, including mammograms and pap smears, as well as important family planning services. Romney has pledged to defund Title X, a program that provides family planning services.

2. Romney supports the Blunt Amendment which would allow employers to deny health insurance coverage on the basis of moral objections — a rule aimed at allowing employers to opt out of providing benefits that undermined their consciences, including contraceptive coverage. But as governor of Massachusetts, Romney required all health care providers– including Catholic hospitals — to offer emergency contraception to rape victims.

3. Romney is fighting a covert battle against contraception, even if he is doing his best not to call it that. While Romney used to be firmly pro-choice and pro-contraceptives, he has positioned himself in the campaign to be a fighter of morality, saying that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposes a “secular vision on America” by requiring employers to provide contraceptives in their insurance coverage. He is also misleading the public on what the ACA will do for women.

4. Romney failed to condemn Rush Limbaugh’s characterization of Sandra Fluke as a “slut.” Romney said “it’s not the language I would have used,” but refused to go any further in condemning Limbaugh’s attacks on the Georgetown Law student who testified in support of the ACA’s contraceptive rule. In not standing up for basic women’s rights, Romney’s complacency is as good as consent.

5. Romney supports restricting access to abortions. He has called Roe v. Wade “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history.” He’s even said that he’d support state constitutional amendments to define life at conception, which would effectively outlaw abortions under any circumstance.

Romney and his campaign have decided to use wife Ann as a way to woo women.  Instead of finding out what women want, Romney says he asks his wife.

But Mitt Romney is running for president and he’s talking about the majority of the American electorate like a strange, exotic species to be fully understood only by someone who knows their strange, native ways.

His answer played exactly into the caricature that has emerged of him– incapable of relating to ordinary Americans (in this case women) and so disconnected from reality that he needs a scout to go out into the wilds of normal America and come back with a full report for him to digest on his own.

He could supplement Mrs. Romney’s field reports to him about female voters with some of the data found deep within the swing state poll, which showed that women’s top priorities going into November are health care, gas prices and unemployment.  The deficit comes right after that, but what comes in dead last for women’s own priorities going into the election?  Government policies toward contraception.

On that score, Romney seems to be paying for the sins of his party.  Although he has not raised the issue on his own, the Republican Party itself seems to have made women’s access to contraception and abortion a top priority over the last several months and alarmed independent and moderate women in the process.  Although women in the poll didn’t call the issue a priority for themselves, a majority said they were following the debate on the issue very closely or somewhat closely.

It certainly isn’t helping Romney for Santorum to be out pushing social issues.  Here’s some of the numbers that show that women aren’t buying the Republican arguments. Romney is facing up to an 18% gender gap right now.

A much discussed USA Today poll shows that Romney is headed for defeat because his party is unattractive to women. At the moment, Romney leads Obama among men by 48 to 47 percent; but he trails among women, 54 to 36 percent. The gender gap is wide enough to re-elect the president by a landslide of 51 to 42 percent.

A lot of pundits have leapt on the idea that the recent debates over government-funded or mandated contraception have made the GOP brand toxic to women. But the USA Today poll indicates that the issue’s impact is rather more qualified than that.

Both men and women rate “government policies on birth control” as the least important question in 2012, and 63 percent of them don’t even know where Romney stands on it. About the same proportion dislikes Romney’s position (24 percent) as much as they do Obama’s (25 percent).

The real gender gap in the USA Today poll is that men think the deficit is the most important issue while women think it’s health care. In short, independent women voters are more exercised about the GOP’s opposition to “Obamacare” than they are its objection to free contraception.

Add to all of this the state-level attacks on public education, abortion access, and public worker unions. Many teachers and state employees are women.  These are the bread-and-butter issues that Republicans think they can use to win women?  As a side note, McCain’s gender gap was 13 percent.  Romney has not only spent time railing against planned parenthood but taking “severely conservative” positions on issues of importance to hispanic women.

During the primary, Romney — who has described his record as “severely conservative” — has touted his opposition to abortion rights, backed legislation to allow some employers to deny health insurance coverage for contraception, and said he would stop funding Planned Parenthood, a women’s health organization that provides cancer screenings, routine examinations, and abortion services.

Romney’s problem with Hispanic voters is even more pronounced after he rejected proposals to allow illegal immigrants a path to legalization, including a bill known as the DREAM Act to let undocumented residents brought to the country as babies or young children obtain citizenship if they attend college or join the military. A poll released last month by Fox News Latino found Romney’s support among likely Latino voters at 14 percent. Obama had the backing of 70 percent of respondents in that poll.

And the most recent Gallup poll conducted March 25-26 found Romney trailing the president among independent voters, 40 percent to Obama’s 48 percent.

“Obviously you have to close the gender gap some, and we definitely need an active campaign in the Hispanic community,” said Charlie Black, a Republican campaign strategist who is advising Romney. Romney also needs to spend time, he added, “cleaning up a little bit of any negative perceptions that were created in the primary — and of course, you have to go back and check and make sure your base will rally around you.”

So, can Mr. Etcha Sketch change any one’s mind given that the Republican convention is going to have its socially radical agenda front and center for all to see?  Gingrich and Santorum are not going quietly into the night even though they have stopped winning elections.  It will be interesting to see how women, GLBT, Hispanics, and the black communities react to Tea Party hysteria on prime time TV.   As an independent woman, I can say I am not happy with the lack of support given women by the Democratic party, but the Republicans are now scaring the living daylights out of me.  My daughters and I are not livestock or insects and the obvious orchestrated attack on our rights is not all in our heads or the political strategy of the DNC.

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